As we count the cost of the freeze, Government prepares for global warming

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As we emerge, temporarily perhaps, from weeks of the coldest weather since records began – with snow disasters right round the northern hemisphere, from the US and Europe to China and Mongolia – more examples come to light of how the cost of extreme cold is far greater than that of warming. We already have a £9.6 billion backlog to cover repairs to roads damaged in previous winters, and the price of repairing the potholes and crumbling asphalt caused by this winter’s even more intense cold threatens to raise that by billions more (even though Government cuts will trim that budget by 15 per cent).

In Northern Ireland, 80,000 households were deprived of water by burst mains operated by the state-owned Northern Ireland Water. Yet as recently as October it published a strategic plan wholly obsessed by the need to transform its infrastructure to meet the challenge of global warming.

Another frozen chicken which came home to roost was the crisis confronting many of the eight million homes now heated by condensing boilers, made compulsory by John Prescott in 2005 as a way of reducing Britain’s carbon footprint. What Mr Prescott failed to do was impose, on this tightly regulated industry, any requirement that the pipes to take away the resulting water should not be placed on the outside of buildings. (Responsibility for this crucial system failure has since been passed to the Health and Safety Executive.)

The result is that up to a million external pipes froze in December, shutting off the heating. In Yorkshire alone, British Gas reported 60,000 emergency call-outs, at up to £300 a time – costing householders a fortune thanks to Mr Prescott’s obsession with global warming.

Meanwhile, two days before Christmas, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published a 130-page document warning how Britain’s infrastructure will “struggle to cope with climate change” between 2030 and 2100, as our road, rail and water networks are threatened by “floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels”.